Imagination Demos New 3DMark OpenGL ES 3.0 Benchmark

Imagination Technologies hit Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with something that no one else has yet. The company on Wednesday became the first to publicly demonstrate 3DMark’s Cloud Gate benchmark on mobile hardware.

Cloud Gate is a DirectX 11 feature level 10 test that was previously only available for testing notebooks and desktop PCs. It’s now been modified for Android and iOS devices using an OpenGL ES 3.0 renderer and is the first benchmark for mobile platforms to make heavy use of the HDR rendering as well as deferred lighting. Cloud Gate's multi-threaded engine uses a deferred renderer that accumulates transformed geometry data and then computes per pixel lighting. The lighting passes use the following techniques:

· Shadow map using light volumes

· Attenuated volumetric illumination and ray casting

· Multiple render targets

· Particle system using transform feedback

· Depth of field

· Procedural FFT-based bloom filter using HDR render targets

Imagination is on the show floor demoing the benchmark on its PowerVR Series6 GPUs exclusively. We met with Futuremark and saw it running on Apple's iPad Air and we're promised that it should be to the various app stores, so we’ll keep you posted on its availability.

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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.